








Chree Reasons by 


I want to be a foreign 





Leaflet No. 5 Missionary 


YOUNG WOMAN’S BRANCH 
Woman’s Board of Foreign Missions 
Reformed Church in America 


25 East 22d Street by 
New York 
Alice B. Van Doren 
ees 7) 











Given at the Anniversary of the Woman’s 
Board of Foreign Missions, R. C. A., in 
Albany, May rath, 1903; revised and printed 
by request of the Leaflet Committee, W.B.F.M. 


Chree Reasons by 


I want to be a foreign Missionary 
by 
Hlice B. Van Doren 


To many people the name of foreign missionary is one of omi- 
nous sound, suggesting either a misguided enthusiast, or a person of 
most pain‘ul and supernatural goodness. Now because I am just 
an ordinary girl, not classed under the first head I hope, not inclu- 
ded under the second I am sure, I am glad to tell the other girls of 
our Reformed Church why, out of all the lines of work open to 

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women, that of the foreign missionary seems to me not only the 
most reasonable but the most attractive as well. 

The first great reason that appeals to me is the desire for service, 
the wish to make life count for something. We all know what that 
means; we have all felt the horror of uselessness, the sickening 
feeling that we don’t count for much anyway, that the world would 
go on quite as well without as with us, People tell us that once 
Christianity meant personal salvation from eternal punishment and 
liberty to sit down in an easy and comfortable expectation of going 
to heaven when we die. If the religion of Jesus Christ ever did 
mean anything so weak and selfish as that, the day is long past: 
to-day we girls, at least in our truest moments, object to sitting 
down in any kind of ease and comfort, whether material or spiritual, 

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while all around us, as some one has expressed it, “a world of sin- 
ning, suffering men, every man my brother, calls on me for work, 
work, work.” We feel in our own lives all the happiness that can 
be given by culture and beautiful surroundings, by home and friend- 
ship, most of all by the love of Christ which glorifies all the rest ; 
and yetin spite of these there remains an unfilled void, unless we 
Can pass them on to some one else ; and we know that the poet was 
right when he bade us 


‘“‘ Measure thy life by loss instead of gain, 
Not by the wine drunk but the wine poured forth.”’ 


Men call this desire for service the spirit of the times; I would 
rather call it the spirit of Jesus Christ, to which the times have at 
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last returned. Is it not the same longing that consumed His life 
who declared, ‘‘ The Son of Man came not to be ministered unto but 
to minister, and to give His life,” and who laid the same mission 
upon His followers when He said “‘ As the Father hath sent Me, even 
so send I you;” “ Freely ye have received, freely give.” 

My second ‘Reason Why” is the overwhelming need of the 
unchristianized world, which cries out for every bit of aid that I can 
offer, for every talent, be it great or small, that I possess. If I have 
determined to give my life in service, it is but reasonable to offer 
that service where the need for it is greatest. Mary Lyon used to 
tell her girls, “If you would truly serve, you must be willing to go 
where no one else will go, and to do what no one else will do.” 
“But,” people say, “there is so much to do right here at home.” 


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There is much, the more shame upon us, but how much when com- 
pared with the need of those other lands? Itis generally allowed 
that New York City, with its influx of foreign population, is the 
neediest portion of the United States, yet New York has more 
Christian workers to day than the whole of India, which has five 
times the population of the United States. And what is the con- 
dition of India? Its age-old religions, worm-eaten through and 
through, are falling into decay. The educated Hindu will no longer 
bow down to his three hundred and thirty millions of gods; he will 
have a religion which his intellect can respect or he will have no re- 
ligion at all: and save where Christianity is stepping in to fill the 
breach, he is fast settling down into Agnosticism. One of the most 
eminent Hindus of the century cries out, “I fear for my countrymen, 


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‘ 


lest from the hell of heathenism they fall into the deeper hell of infi- 
delity.” Yet the need of India is but an index of the need of every 
mission field. Right before me I have an appeal just issued by one 
of the prominent mission boards of this country asking for 214 mis- 
sionaries to go out at once to fill the immediate needs of that 
one denomination. Do you wonder that the need of the world 
—the world for which Christ died—forms one of my strongest 
motives ? 

Yet the desire for service and the realization of need could not 
alone be sufficient ; they might be enough to take me to the foreign 
field, driven by the spur of enthusiasm, but they could not keep me 
there. It is one thing to dream of love for the heathen while sepa- 
rated from them by thousands of miles: it will be another, meeting 

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them face to face, to find them often dirty and ignorant, even repul- 
sive, possessed of a need so great that it does not recognize itself, of 
a degradation so deep that it seeks for no uplifting hand, Then itis 
that a third motive must enter in, a supreme faith in the Christ-like 
possibilities of every human heart. Because we are told that God 
created man in His own image, we must believe that somewhere, no 
matter how far out of sight, that image lingers still. Because Christ 
loved our human kind so mucn that He laid down His life for it, we 
also must believe in men and women, we also must love them, “even 
unto the end.”’ 

These then are my three reasons—The desire for service, the 
realization of the unutterable need of that service on the foreign 
field, the belief that the most degraded can be uplifted by the love 

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of Christ. Are there no other girls in our dear church to whom the 
same motives appeal? Have you ever wondered just why life has 
been given to you? Have you ever felt an indefinable longing to 
give to it a meaning it has never possessed? That very unrest may 
be the Master’s bidding to follow Him. Or perhaps desire and 
ambition are calling loudly, persistently for their selfish gratification, 
while from the opposite direction comes the voice of Jesus, asking, 
“ Lovest thou Me more than these?"’ Perhaps you will say that no 
such summons ever has come, that God has never called you to the 
foreign mission field. Are you quite sure that you have listened for 
His voice? Oh, girls, has He called you to a life of ease and luxury 
at home? Andif you demand a definite call for the one, you must 
in all fairness examine carefully whether you have had a call to the 
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other. Let me only remind you of the words of Keith-Falconer, 


‘“‘While vast continents lie shrouded in utter darkness, oppressed by 
the horrors of heathenism or of Islam, the burden of proof lies upon 


me to show what reason I have to keep me out of the foreign 
mission field.” 





